Wednesday, November 19, 2014

About half a year ago, a discussion on the best outline of the Amphoe articles on the German Wikipedia raised the question how many of the subdistrict administrative organizations (SAO/TAO) don't cover the same area as the corresponding subdistrict. I couldn't answer back then, I only knew that the about 900 subdistrict municipalities created in 1999 usually cover only parts of a subdistrict, so the TAO covers the remaining parts; and I knew that especially in Ayutthaya province, several adjoining subdistricts are merged together to one single TAO. However, I could not give the actual numbers for each category of TAO.

In order to be able to give these numbers, I started to add a new XML tag to my data files, but only did this for a few provinces at first. Luckily, my fellow Wikipedian hdamm came to help and also added these tags to many of the XML files, so right now the central and southern provinces are completely tagged, as well as most of the northern provinces and some of those in the northeast. Though there are still 1285 local government missing, I think it is worth to give a partial answer now - at least to show that this blog isn't dead, I just was too busy with other tasks and thus haven't found the time to writeup good postings here.

Right now, there are 7852 local governments, of which the 76 provincial administrative organization and Bangkok are special cases which are out of this statistics. Those considered are

30 cities (Thesaban Nakhon, เทศบาลนคร)

175 towns (Thesaban Mueang, เทศบาลเมือง)

2235 subdistrict municipalities (Thesaban Tambon, เทศบาลตำบล)

5334 subdistrict administrative organizations (องค์การบริหารส่วนตำบล)

1 special administrative area (i.e. Pattaya)

For 1285 of these 7775 the data isn't entered yet, but those which have a coverage defined fall into the following three categories.

4497 (69%) cover exactly one subdistrict

1509 (23%) cover one subdistrict partially

485 (7%) cover more than one subdistrict at least in part (118 of these are TAO)

125 (2%) cover more than one subdistrict, and all of them completely (71 of these are TAO)

I'll post an update of this statistics once I have it for all of the local governments.

Changwat, Amphoe, Tambon

Everything about the administrative subdivisions of Thailand - history, current news, facts hardly found in English, reviews of corresponding books, the Wikipedia coverage of these entities...

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